FutureFest 2012
Presented by Dayton Playhouse
July 27-29
Dayton
Local media coverage: Dayton Most Metro | Dayton Daily News article |
A festival of new and unproduced plays.
Official page | Online ticket for festival pass |
A POLITICAL WOMAN
Directed by Cynthia Karns, Fully Staged | Online ticketing |
As a debate rages in the Canadian parliament over universal suffrage, young Maggie Shand slowly becomes instrumental to her husband’s political life. But she soon realizes that her newfound political influence has a price – one she may not be willing to pay. Inspired by the play “what every woman knows” by J.M. Barrie, a political woman is at once a historical comedy and an exploration of a crucial time in gender politics with echoes that are all too relevant in the modern day.
PROVENANCE
Directed by David Shough, Staged Reading | Online ticketing |
Provenance – lives and breathes in the world of wine. Yet it is emphatically not a play about wine. Rather, the cultivation of wine serves as an overarching metaphor for the history of change and growth that affects each character on stage. Like the mysterious champagne in question, four characters are trapped inside their own personal histories. The only way out: personal reinvention. Change becomes an act of survival. But how far will a person bend the truth to escape his or her past? What are the consequences? In this explosive examination of history and identity, secrets, like lies, are impossible to contain.
NUREYEV’S EYES
Directed by Annie Pesch, Staged Reading | Online ticketing |
During the 70s, Jamie Wyeth (son of Andrew) painted a series of works of Rudolf Nureyev, the dancer. The play examines what their relationship may have been like, how they passed through good and bad times and ultimately changed each other.
CURVE
Directed by Jim Lockwood, Fully Staged | Online ticketing |
In this witty, provocative play about truth and illusion, unrelenting rain pours down outside the Connecticut home of Dakin Abernathy. Inside, Dakin and his neighbor, Ted Mueller, engage in a verbal joust where nothing is as it seems. Or is it? Dakin, a noted film noir director, accuses Ted of having killed his own wife. Ted protests, yet as morning spins into afternoon and a thunderous evening, he begins to believe that he might, indeed, be a murderer. Dakin’s wife, Angela, complicates events with her flaky personality, and their daughter, Lana Veronica, comes home for the weekend saying she is in trouble with the law. Events escalate and secrets are revealed until the play itself suggests one of Dakin’s film noir classics, complete with dark music, ominous lighting and swirling fog.
EXCAVATION
Directed by Nancy Campbell, Staged Reading | Online ticketing |
Excavation – is a journey into the past to unlock the future. A widowed father who works as a security guard at New York’s American Museum of Natural History struggles to reach his mute seven year old son, who is fading away from grief over his mother’s death. Meanwhile, a parallel story takes place on the Southwest corner of England in the 1800s, as one of the first paleontologists, Mary Anning, struggles for her own survival as she scours the shorelines for whispers and vestiges of worlds gone by…
THE ROUGH MAGIC
Directed by Gayle Smith, Fully Staged | Online ticketing |
I believe that Americans are by and large a lonely people. Our productivity and medication and social media notwithstanding, many of us struggle to make sense of things, to find a sustainable balance between melancholy and hope. Joy, when it comes, is often momentary, and must be savored. In my work, I celebrate those who fight to maintain equilibrium. This Rough Magic takes place a few years from now, when overcoming loneliness and feeling loved are no less of a problem, but when technology offers more solutions to those who can afford them.
DRACULA
Behind the Curtain Cincinnati 